eve

so i think i've finally found a game that i play often enough that i will say that it could be addicting, if there wasn't so much waiting involved in playing the game. i mean... look at how many jumps it will take to make a round trip in picking up an item i just bought, a ship i need, and then getting it all back to where i need it. i mean, i guess sure, this is to help keep the realism of the distance i'm traveling (several hundred thousand AU's per jump) but come on.. it IS a game. those 18 jumps will probably take me about half an hour to complete.

and don't even get me started on the time i have to wait to get a skill trained up to a respectable level. (if not several days than at least most of a day). i've heard players some players say that if i trained nothing but the bare minimum skills needed, it can take up to a year to be allowed to sit on a super carrier. and when i say minimum i mean minimum. sitting in the ship doesn't mean that i know how to make it fly very fast at all, or even fire it's weapons. that could be another half year to get to that point.

all that being said, it really is an awesome game. the learning curve never seems to settle. if anything it just get higher. the more i think i know the more amazed i am when someone introduces something completely new to me. an aspect i had no idea existed. just a couple weeks ago someone introduced to me the art of exploring. sending probes out and finding things that arn't exactly on the map. things like wormholes. or pirate hideouts, or rouge AI drones. the list goes on.

i think this is a surprisingly accurate graph on how the learning curve works compared to most of the other big massive multi-player online (MMO) games. i know it says gaming skill but just imagine it says 'amount learned'.

that part where it actually has you go back in time after that huge increase in knowledge is the part where you suddenly discover something huge, so you go and delete your character because you realize you've screwed him up so badly you might as well start over. i think i'm getting close to doing that with my character right now.. and he's been almost constantly training for nearly 3 months. my fear, and hope, is that i'm about where those spears are where it just begins to slightly curve up. which means i'm about to learn all this stuff about the game that will hopefully help me play alot smarter and less expensively. maybe will help me get killed a little less even! i can only hope.

another good example of how complicated this game can be is that it has built into the game a market tool that measures 4 different averages of the prices of each item in the game.

i'm not going to go into the details of how that thing works cause i've been using it for months and i still don't understand it. oh and the 10.00M, 20.00M, etc that you see on the left side of the graph stands for 10 million, 20 million, etc respectively. expensive? for a new player, yes. and by new i mean someone like me who has been playing less than about 6 months i guess. but i've heard other players talk about buying "cheap" ships like this one like it was pocket change. right now i feel rich having just 10 million in my wallet.

so yah, EVE-online. great game. you have to pay monthly until you can start earning enough in-game money to buy your next month of play time with ISK. (current cost is a little more than 300 million, i believe)

Creating music videos

So a number of years ago (more than 10 i think) my oldest brother and my dad took some old footage of the Blue Angels, and the song "Reise Reise" performed by Rammstein and did some pretty awesome footage editing and sound meshing using nothing but a VCR (no such thing as DVD's yet remember?) and some tape recorders, and made this little masterpiece. why? because they felt like it, and it's a cool thing to do.  they saved it, of course, on a vcr tape. once we got the chance to make it digital however we moved the video to youtube.

jump forward several years and dad was in the mood to do it again, but this time he wanted to choose the music. this time i got to be the one to help him, and instead of using a vcr and tape recorders we simply used windows movie maker, and the footage from the same original tape, and out came this. if you watch the two videos you will see that there is alot of the same clips used in both videos.

The reason for the same footage is that during the process of making these videos we discovered 2 things. the first, is that LIFE, as in real life, that thing that exists outside the door to your house, works in what musicians know as 4 4 time. the second, is that the same images can give totally different feelings, if there are different sounds. While Rammstein's Reise Reise gives the Blue Angels something of a majestic feeling, U2's Vertigo gives the blue angels a feeling of double-dog-dare fun.

While making Vertigo, dad and i got to a point where we were kind of stuck as to how to proceed so we decided to put it to the side for a bit and have a laugh. Que entrance, The Macarena.

Seriously, every time i see this i still laugh, and it's been 3 years at least. we did this because we wanted to take the whole "feeling of the image" thing to the next step. Reise Reise, was majestic and serious. Vertigo was a Dare-Devils Matchmaker. Macarena was fun and silly. it's as simple and straight forward as that.

these were all edited for the simple fun of editing. no commercial gain is expected, or even desired. The only credit i can take for these videos is syncing the audio and video together. the music belongs to their respective artist, and the video belongs to whoever held/holds the contract to the department that video records the blue angels. <-disclaimer

So the reason for this post? I want to make music videos again, and i wanted to explain why i wanted to make them in the first place. I tried to get back into it again about a year ago, using video that i shot of some friends playing paintball but i just didn't like the way it was coming out, and so i never finished it. thus, no link. sorry.

since i'm 100% new at this blogging thing, i really don't know what i'm going to be posting about. so for now it get's to be my "thought dumpster" if you will. not quite a diary, but close. maybe eventually it will turn into a diary maybe not. i'm going to try to avoid that though. so unless something big happens and i need to tell the world, this is kind of what you'll be getting. heck, maybe if i do get back into making vids i'll just turn this into an update feed for that.

For now that's it. leave your comments, thoughts, well wishes, concerns, complaints, trolls, etc below if you wish.

Blogging

I've been told that blogging is a pretty good way to let loose pent up frustrations, tell good news, spew random thoughts etc. so i figured i'd give it a shot.
here is my thought of the day, and the reason i am only now starting this. it is something that someone (dunno who) said about blogging and i generally agree.
Blogging: Never before have so many people with so little to say, said so much to so few.